Elite: Dangerous rolled out its Commanders 2.3 update, introducing what our own Justin dubbed “sitting in cockpits” — you won’t be walking in stations per se, but you will at least be able to roll up impressively detailed avatars and multi-crew your spaceships.

Late last night, Star Citizen published its 2017 development roadmap, suggesting that 3.0 will arrive this summer, though it’ll be less ambitious in scope than originally planned, as some of its features will be pushed to later in the year.

And congrats are due to Starfighter Inc., which pulled off a big Kickstarter win earlier this afternoon and takes home over $170,000.

This week in MMO crowdfunding, City of Heroes-inspired superhero MMORPG Ship of Heroes launched its Kickstarter, seeking $400,000. But three days later, Heroic Games canceled the crowdfunding attempt, saying it believed it “went to Kickstarter too early.” The new plan is to return to development, raise awareness, take donations through the website, and retool development based on its current level of funding, meaning a potentially smaller but earlier game.

In happier news, congrats are due to post-apoc sandbox Edengrad, which successfully launched into early access. Edengrad was funded last year for over $50,000 US thanks to Kickstarter backers.

We’ve been covering Starfighter Inc. for the last few weeks in Make My MMO, but apparently a lot of you folks who say you want to hear about up-and-coming MMOs aren’t following that column (*HARD STARE*), so let’s shine a brighter spotlight!

The 20-man Impeller Studios team is marketing the game as “Counter-Strike meets World of Warships in Space.” It’s been in development for three years already, has a ridiculously high bar for scientific accuracy, uses Unreal Engine 4, and will indeed support VR.

“Starfighter Inc. puts you in the cockpit of the future in a hard science-fiction based multiplayer space combat simulator for Windows PC, featuring hardcore shooter gameplay in the spirit of X-Wing vs. TIE-Fighter, but with unprecedented depth and sophistication. Starfighter Inc. combines the lethality and permadeath of Counter-Strike with the technical depth and customization of World of Warships. The key difference is that players operate a variety of nuclear-powered single and multi-crew fighters, reconnaissance ships, strike craft, and support ships, with weapons ranging from lasers, railguns, and missiles, to electronic and cyber warfare capabilities.”

This week in MMO crowdfunding, Elite: Dangerous rather unceremoniously announced on social media that the 2.3 Commanders update will launch around the middle of April — this is the huge update with multicrew ship functionality and the character creation system. (Thanks, ThatLanteshGuy!)

We also hosted Legends of Aria founder Derek Brinkmann on a special edition of the podcast this week, so if you’re curious about the large-scale future of what used to be the more small-scale Shards Online, give it a thorough listen. Then read on for more on what’s up with MMO crowdfunding over the last week and the regular roundup of all the crowdfunded MMOs we’ve got our eye on.

You can’t win them all, kid. And while $226,000 is an impressive chunk of money to raise for a game, it wasn’t enough to launch Starfighter Inc. into development.

The spiritual successor to the popular X-Wing space shooter, Starfighter Inc. was attempting to utilize Kickstarter as a fundraising platform to raise a quarter of a million dollars. Even though it had a strong start and was eyeing stretch goals early on, Starfighterstill fell thousands short of hitting the mark.

The good news is that Impeller Studios doesn’t look to be giving up on the project, encouraging fans to stay tuned: “We’ll update the front page later today and send an announcement on our partners as well as the roadmap via the newsletter this week.”

In a bizarre coincidence, four separate MOBAs announced new champions this week. SMITE revealed an adorable Norse squirrel god named Ratatoskr and officially launched its XBox One closed beta. League of Legends put new champion Ekko on its public test server and pushed Patch 5.9 live with major changes to Ashe and a small change to the game’s Attack Move function. Infinite Crisis released DC Comics villain Solomon Grundy, a resurrected corpse who returns to life after being killed. Heroes of the Storm showed off Warcraft’s famous Blood Elf fire mage Kael’thas and announced a $200,000 top prize in a new $1.2 million tournament series to be held at this year’s BlizzCon.

Online RTS Grey Goo released nine new symmetrical maps designed for competitive online play, and Path of Exile showed off its new Ice Crash melee skill gem. Dota 2‘s compendium sales broke the $27 million revenue mark, and develoeprs added several new ways to gain compendium points. Elite: Dangerous released a Mac version that will play online seamlessly with the PC client and announced the release date for its upcoming Powerplay update. Star Citizen released Alpha patch 1.1.3 to fix an exploit and several bugs, opening the game to free play over the weekend. And X-Wing may be getting a spiritual successor as the series’ Lead Designer David Wessman is attempting to Kickstart a new space shooter named Starfighter Inc.